| Studio album number five from Canada’s folk-pop diva, and her first studio recording since Surfacing in 1997.
There are a few things that are generally a given on Sarah McLachlan’s albums – solid production values, spare but lush-sounding instrumentation and gorgeous melancholic harmonies. This has the paradoxic effect of making her albums sound somewhat interchangeable.
All these things are true of Afterglow and on the first listen, I had to fight to pay attention and keep the album from fading pleasantly into the background. However on second and third listen, the album begins to develop a character – subtly-toned to be sure, but there.
McLachlan’s lyrics are often where the payoff lies – intense and dreamlike, they evoke brooding without self-absorption, which is a tough line to walk. One is tempted to think she writes autobiographically, but the range of emotion and situations she addresses is too wide for that, and while she’s often lumped in with all the other autobiographical singer-songwriters, she has a focused talent for understated and insightful writing.
Although she’s known for wearing her beliefs on her sleeve, she doesn’t often write them into her songs as she has on Afterglow. The tone is surprisingly dark. As McLachlan matures, her songs are less fraught with passionately screwed-up relationships, and more focused on the lives we lead and choices we make – not just as lovers, but as parents, people, and citizens of the world.
Despite the fact that McLachlan’s albums make undeniably pretty wallpaper at dinner parties, this one’s still got a thing or two to say to us.
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